Read Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation for Free Online Page A

time
Strange stories got about. It was
observed that Ho-ti’s cottage was burnt down more frequently than ever.
Nothing but fires from this time forward … As often as the sow farrowed,
so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze.
    Their secret eventually got out, neighbors
tried the technique for themselves and marveled at the results, and the practice caught
on. In fact, the custom of burning down houses to improve the taste of piglets grew so
widespread that people began to worry that the art and science of architecture would be
lost to the world. (“People built slighter and slighter every day,” Lamb
tells us, and “now there was nothing to be seen but fires in every
direction.”) Fortunately, a wiser head eventually figured out that the flesh of
pigs might be cooked “without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress
it.” The invention of the gridiron and then the spit soon followed. And so did
humankind discover quite by accident the art of cooking meat over fire—or, rather, we
should probably specify, over a
controlled
fire.
     

     
    “Welcome to the vestibule of
hell.” Samuel Jones chuckled as he walked me around back of the Skylight Inn to
visit the cookhouse where the pits are. There were two cookhouses, actually,
cinder-block buildings the size of cottages sited at odd, arbitrary angles to both the
restaurant and each other. (“Granddaddy apparently hired a drunk to design
everything out here,” Samuel explained.) The larger of the two buildings had
recently been completely rebuilt, having burned to the ground late one night after one
of its brick hearths had failed. “Wekeep those fires burning
twenty-four/seven, and every couple of years even the firebricks lining the inside of
the chimneys just give out.” He shrugged. “I’d say this cookhouse has
caught on fire about a dozen times. But that’s just how it goes when you’re
doing whole-hog barbecue the right way.”
    Sometimes it’s the hog grease that
pools in the bottom of the pit that catches fire; other times a burning cinder will
climb the column of smoke rising through the chimney and then fall back onto the roof.
Just the other night, Samuel happened to be driving by the restaurant a couple of hours
after closing time when he noticed a tongue of flame licking out from beneath the
smoke-room door. “Now, that was a
real
close call,” he smiled. (A
surveillance camera in the cookhouse indicated the fire had started only four minutes
after the pitman had left for the night.)
    Charles Lamb would no doubt be pleased to
know that there are still men in North Carolina upholding the tradition of burning down
whole buildings in order to improve the flavor of pigs.
    Samuel is a cheery, round-faced, goateed man
of twenty-nine who has been working in the family business off and on since he was nine
years old. He is abundantly proud of the institution his family has built, and feels a
profound sense of obligation to keep the tradition not just going but uncontaminated by
modern innovations, aka “shortcuts.” Southern barbecue is ever looking only
backward, but over time that gets harder and harder to do. “It’s a fact that
our family cannot ever sell this business,” he explains, perhaps a bit ruefully,
“because, see, we’re grandfathered in. With the health department. Anyone
who bought it who wasn’t a Jones? Well, they would have to bring the place up to
code, and right there, that would be the end of it.”
    As we stepped into the new cookhouse, I
could immediately see what he meant. Actually, I couldn’t see much of anything at
first: The room was wreathed in a thick fog of fragrant wood smoke, andthough it couldn’t have been more than twenty-five feet from one end of the
building to the other, I could barely make out the steel door on the far wall. At either
end of the room stands a big, deep brick fireplace, in which a monster-sized grate
fabricated from car axles holds a tall stack of flaming logs.